Square Enix Announces Project Flare Cloud Gaming Service

Game publisher aims to improve upon OnLive’s technological missteps

Square Enix has announced Project Flare, a cloud gaming service similar to what OnLive offered back in 2010. Unlike OnLive, however, the game publisher asserts that the company’s service will offer a “technological breakthrough in cloud gaming.”

While Project Flare is similar to OnLive, there are a number of key technological differences. Instead of using physical computers to stream game data, Square Enix is using virtual supercomputers in the cloud. The company showed us 57 game instances running on a single server. The games included Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Final Fantasy XI, and other pre-existing Square Enix games. The company asserts that its virtual supercomputers will be able to handle many more instances of games that are built from the ground up to take advantage of Project Flare.

Here's a layout of how traditional game streaming services work.

Furthermore, Square Enix says that future games that take advantage of Project Flare will be able to use open source APIs to incorporate data from Google Maps, Google Traffic, and other open source programs to create more realistic worlds.

One of the biggest areas where Project Flare differentiates itself from OnLive is with its use of processing power. The company asserts that other gaming streaming services constantly have to switch between CPU and GPU usage and this creates an inefficient processing bottleneck. Square Enix says that with Project Flare, it will be able to share system resources and dole out the appropriate processing power (CPU or GPU) as necessary. With this, Square Enix asserts that the more players that log onto a particular game, the less latency the end user will experience. For instance, if 10 players are playing through the same level, rather than rendering 100% of the level 10 times, Project Flare will intelligently pool the rendered assets together to achieve processing efficiency and reduce redundancy. The company asserts this will cut down on lag. This is achieved by going down to the DX level of each title, which was something that systems like OnLive did not do.

Furthermore, Project Flare will also allow game developers to use different dedicated servers for different tasks. For instance, there could be three separate servers that respectively manage the rendering engine, AI, and physics. In theory, this should free up processing power for developers that build their games with Project Flare in mind.

Deus Ex Project Flare Demo

Square Enix showed us a demo of Deus Ex: Human Revolution running with two different servers in tandem. One server acted as the game renderer whereas the other server managed the game’s physics. In the demo, we see a robot blowing up a bunch of boxes to where they all impressively tumble down the screen. Because there is a separate server that handles the physics, there is no hit to the rendering engine’s framerate.

The difference between how typical streaming services handle processing power and how Project Flare works.

The service is still in its early stages and when we asked what platforms it would appear on, Square Enix said it should be supported on PCs, tablets, and will in general be “platform agnostic.” So far the company is working with other developers and revealed that Ubisoft is also on board. In addition, the company is currently talking with several data companies to have it roll out across North America.

While the technology certainly sounds interesting, Square Enix is also banking that widespread adoption of fiber Internet will soon be in our future. What do you think of Project Flare? Let us know in the comments below!

The only game relating to a cloud that I want from Squenix is for the jackasses to make a PROPER remake of Final Fantasy 7!

For pete's sake they've remade FF2/FF4 and FF3/FF6 several times already in PS, GBA, NDS, and PSP flavors, why not remake the FF game fans have been clamoring to get an update for since newer better visuals were possible.

I didn't play FF7 during its heyday. Had no PSX and, later on, didn't like the Advent Children movie.

I saw the remake on Steam and the graphics looked abhorrent. My smartphone laughed so hard at them that it was shaking (or it just got a text lol). Steam has a blurb about requiring some SE account to play the game, which further killed my desire to play it.

Ahhh... well I don't know about portable devices and the like... But regardless of the graphical quality it's well worth playing, but it truly deserves a re-make every bit as much as some of it's equally great contemporaries.

But by today's standards, of course the PS1 level graphics are ridiculously low powered. Heck even in its heyday, most people don't remember that it was originally developed as an EXPANSION device (like the SEGA CD) but for the Super Nintendo, so of course it had EARLY 90's level capabilities and horsepower... You've got to keep in mind that PS1 launched in 1994, in an era where "texturing" polygons was considered CUTTING EDGE.

In 20 years from now (remember, the PS1 launched in 1994, and we're basically a -MONTH- away from 2014 now) I'd bet the most marvelous games we have now will look like Pong and frogger do today.

I haven't had the time to play through it, but the Steam re-release of FF7 works fine for me on Win7 Pro 64x, so I'd think it'd work comparably well on your system, if that helps...

Good luck to you, and try not to miss out on a great game experience like FF7 solely based on the graphics.

Square Enix better have deep pockets. Its the same as "I am going to stream TV and Movies via the Internet!" Even Intel backed out of that fiasco. Streaming games through the web is only going to work if the servers are damn close to the ISP, if not in their buildings. NVidia has a better chance of that.
Too much hype to type about.

Jimmy, last month you reported about all the awesome technology that Nvidia is planning to come out with and part of those advancements are part of Grid's GaaS (Gaming as a Service). Grid is hardware companies like Gaikai use (I'm assuming with the Sony buy out, for services that will be offered soon on the PS4). So with this technology, Nvidia is already behind before the technology went mainstream?

This is why I love technology, it is always changing. I only hope someone perfects GaaS soon. It would be very cool to have a portable gaming system to play a real game while at lunch at work.

Well, I certainly wouldn't call stream gaming mainstream. And yes, Nvidia has Grid but we haven't heard much from it lately. It seems like Nvidia is still in talks with different data providers to see about it getting rolled out. Still, while we don't know that much about Grid at this point, Square Enix does seem to be taking a different approach to the tech.

I find it funny that they label it as *cloud instead of *server, when in fact what their technology imply's is cluster computing, and when you hear the world cloud that means on a server someplace duh..

But there is a difference. Yes for the most part it is the same, however the "cloud" employs servers/clusters from more than one location all over the world vs the traditional server concept of just a cluster or two in one location. This is why the cloud has less bottlenecks compared to just one "centralized" server, and allows for better redundancy. Not saying the cloud is better or "new" exactly, just that it's a smarter way to do some tasking.

What this all boils down to is an always online requirement for any game that's built to take advantage of this. That also means that any game that does so will officially end for good whenever the publisher decides that they no longer want to host the game.

Remember great games of past like Quake III, Unreal Tournament or even Skyrim which had huge lifetimes because of user created content? Well say goodbye to games like that. Publishers only make money once off a games that we play for years and why would they let us to play a single game for years when they can artificially end a game's life by discontinuing support for it?

No matter how many benefits they try to convince us that this will provide to gamers in the long run they would only invest in the technology if they were able to profit from it.